There are 3½ weeks to go. Life, and political campaigns, can turn on a dime. But I think it just turned on a lot of dimes. There was an October surprise, and it has all but certainly decided the race. On the left, a smug triumphalism is setting in. On the right, anger rises: the finger pointing is about to begin. In parts and pockets of the middle, we have Americans who aren’t thinking about politics because they’re busy trying to imagine what a modern depression would look like and wondering, for the first time ever, if it is possible that they may wind up living in their cars.

But to the campaign:

People speak of the Bradley effect – more people tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate than actually vote for the black candidate. I have been wondering about the possibility of what may someday be called the Obama effect: You know your neighbors think he’s sketchy – unknown, a mystery, “Hussein” – so you don’t say you’re voting for him, but you are.

But Democrats should remain concerned about this: We have two wars, an economic collapse, a two-term Republican president at historic lows in popularity, overwhelmingly negative poll answers on whether America is on the right track – and the Democratic nominee isn’t 20 – or 30 – points ahead? This should be a landslide. They say Barack Obama cannot “close the deal.” He hasn’t closed the deal because he’s still making the pitch, and to wary customers who want something new but aren’t sure this is the time to buy.

The McCain campaign has spent the past week trying to increase doubts as to Obama’s nature, background, intentions. Their crowds have been irascible. Here is a warning for Republicans: When your crowds go from “I love you” to “I hate the other guy,” you are in trouble, you are on a losing strain. Winning campaigns are built on love. This is the time for “McCain is the answer,” not “The other guy is questionable.”

We are in crisis – a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we got from the candidates, in last week’s presidential debate, was a bunch of gummy meanderings – smooth, rounded sentences so full of focus-grouped inanities that, six minutes in, viewers entered a kind of trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere impressions. The look of things.

The pseudo-tough political operatives who surround both candidates sometimes grouse, in private, that it’s all symbols now, all mood, all about the visual. But they have real responsibility here. They send their candidates out to speak such thin gruel, such spat-out porridge, that we are struck dumb, and left daydreaming about the fact that Obama’s suits are always slate gray and never seem to wrinkle, and McCain tonight seems like a rabbity forest creature darting amid the hedgerows.

As to what they will do about the crisis, Obama will raise taxes on the rich and help us weatherize our homes, while McCain favors “energy independence” and buying up mortgages. On the causes of the crisis they spoke of insufficient regulation, or high spending.

Why would anyone trust either candidate to help dig us out of this if they can’t speak frankly about what got us into it?

One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it’s all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow. It is asking a lot to ask a political animal to be thoughtful, because they find meaning in action. But now and then you want to see them think. You want to see them speak the truth. This is one of those times.